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>> Tuesday, December 8, 2009

"You can actually use the 605 without a disc emulator for program development. You simply burn your assets to a disc and run the software from a connected hard drive or the floppy drive - starting the software from the terminal connection. With the right software on the 605 hard drive and connecting the box to the pc with a terminal emulator you can transfer software to the box from the same session. We used it this way quite a bit as another (hardware) alternative to debugging on the I2M cards. At one point we had worked out how to share a drive on the SCSI chain between a PC and the 605 so that we could compile directly to the connected hard drive.

We experimented with sharing the hard drive between the 605 and the PC also and it works okay as long as you keep in mind the FAT and directory caching issues. You need a special SCSI cable and rejumper either the 605 or your PC SCSI interface, otherwise both end up using SCSI ID 7.

The OS-9 PCF file manager caches almost nothing, so using it for reading data written by the PC works fine (sometimes you have to force a cache flush but this usually happens automatically within a few seconds). However, if you want to write to the hard disk from the 605 and subsequently read it from the PC you have to flush the PC cache and reload it after the writing is done.

We initially used Windows 3.1 and found that we had to quit Windows and use SMARTDRV /F (or something). With Windows 9X it got easier: you could just take a full drive lock from a DOS box (I think we used the LOCK command).

The technique you describe for using an asset disc also works on most consumer players if you download the application using the serial port; we even went to far as to have special file open routines that looked for downloaded versions of specific asset files. This was sometimes necessary to debug player incompatibilities. You needed a DVC, of course, or there usually wasn't enough RAM for the downloading as our CD-i games had a tendency to use all of the available base-case memory for screen buffers, compiled sprites and sound effects.

At the time we used a crappy Philips tool called PCCDI to do the serial downloading (it had serial port bugs), but nowadays you could use my CD-i Link program (works on modern PCs and over an USB-Serial adapter).

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